i often wonder how i ever got into drafting, which eventually led me to engineering and currently 3D modelling and model management. dad, being a tradie, i never thought i got it from him. i just figured it was my choice in high school to study computer drafting. but prior to that, i got into technical drawing on the board. pencils erasers and cranky teachers. so computer drafting was a logical step from manual drafting.

dad the tradie, as mentioned in my post about water cooling my pc i think at least, is a bit of a closet nerd. while i was visiting dad recently, i realised that it was indeed he who led me down the path i have taken with my career. you see, if you take a step further back to the days of the amstrad cpc, 3″ floppy disks, 4mhz cpus and 128kb of ram displayed in 16 glorious colours, dad used to write programs for the computer for me to play with.

most of the programs were games or programs i asked a question and it gave me a funny answer, one of the programs though i had to control a ‘turtle’ which was a little triangle shaped thing by typing “@100<45” which would draw a line 100 pixels long at an angle of 45 degrees – which is exactly what you’d type into autocad, but rather than pixels, it would be an actual measurement. i drew boxes and circles and triangles and all sorts of stuff.

i always thought the programs dad wrote were pretty cool, and i thought dad was awesome for being able to make programs on our little computer. nothing has changed though. he’s still awesome 🙂

this is the sort of stuff i draw now. that is all the plumbing, gas and fire for a 6 storey office and performance arts building in 3D.